John Cale - Mercy

Mercy is the seventeenth solo studio album by Welsh musician John Cale, released in January 2023 via Double Six Records and Domino.

John Cale has released Mercy, his first new album of original songs in a decade, which includes the track “Story Of Blood” featuring Weyes Blood.

For nearly 60 years, or at least since he was a young Welshman who moved to New York and formed The Velvet Underground, Cale has been reinventing his music with dazzling and inspiring regularity. There was the bewitching chamber folk of Paris 1919 followed instantly by the gnarled rock of Fear, the provocative and spare song cycle Music for a New Society followed more than thirty years later by mighty and unabashed electronic updates.

Once again, here is Cale, reimagining how his music is made, sounds, and even works. His engrossing 12-track Mercy moves through true dark-night-of-the-soul electronics toward vulnerable love songs and hopeful considerations for the future.

On Mercy, Cale enlists some of music’s most curious young minds: Animal Collective, Sylvan Esso, Laurel Halo, Tei Shi, Actress. They’re only some of the astounding cast who climb inside Cale’s consummate vision of the world and help him redecorate there.

Mercy is the continuation of a long career’s work with wonder. Cale has always searched for new ways to explore old ideas of alienation, hurt, and joy; Mercy is the latest transfixing find of this unsatisfied mind.

This double album 2LP record set is an independent record stores limited edition on translucent violet coloured vinyl housed in a gatefold sleeve with printed inner sleeves, pressed in the UK via Double Six.